Lascars – Forgotten Seafarers
19th-century toilet sign in English and Bengali from Queen’s Dock, Glasgow
© CGS CIC Glasgow Museums Collection
A new display at Riverside Museum explores the lives of the lascars – South Asian seamen - who sailed on British ships and who were once regularly seen in Glasgow.
Shipping companies employed lascar crews because they could legally be paid less and given cheaper food. Employers also thought that lascars, being mainly Muslim, wouldn’t drink alcohol and get into fights.
In Glasgow, special arrangements were made, including quayside toilets and a hostel at Queen’s Dock, plus a social club. These provided lascars with culturally appropriate food and facilities, but also demonstrate control and separation by the shipping companies and port authorities.
The display features a specially made film by Aqsa Arif.
Aqsa Arif is a Scottish Pakistani artist based in Glasgow.
She is deeply engaged in the intersection of film, photography, sculpture, and printmaking, exploring syncretic identities, displacement, and the process of assimilation. Grounded in the narrative structures of folklore, mythology, and cinematic spaces, she navigates these realms through the lens of her own dual identity, endeavouring to reclaim and re-imagine pre- and post-colonial worlds.
Worldbuilding is central to her work, involving the creation and uncovering of new realities and possibilities. Within these fictional environments, she explores the relationship between the mythical, folkloric, and historical, challenging perspectives and embracing hybridity.
She employs characters, avatars and artefacts as sacred vessels for expression and as entry points to immerse the audience within the uncomfortable and disparate. Her work aims to reclaim singular narratives altered by colonial histories, crafting new stories that re-imagine our past, present, and future identities.
The display is the final outcome of ‘Scotland’s Lascar Heritage', an innovative community-led research project which connects the lascars’ historic seafaring story with contemporary South Asian identity in Scotland, as well as linking to the lives of surviving lascar seamen in Bangladesh.
The project was a collaboration between Glasgow Life Museums, the Bangladesh Association Glasgow and young people from the Our Shared Cultural Heritage initiative. It had many different strands, including research in the UK and Bangladesh, film, a zine, a podcast, a blog and art – and everything was shared in community-led events and seminars, as well as in a final publication: Scotland’s Lascar Heritage: Investigating the Lives of South Asian Mariners. One particular highlight was the play Lascari, written, directed and performed by members of the Bangladesh Association Glasgow.
We were delighted when we won the Museums Association’s ‘Best Museums Change Lives Project Award’ in 2023. The publication won the Alan Ball Local History Award and was shortlisted in the research category of 2023’s Saltire Society National Book Awards.
An outstanding publication, brilliantly researched and written, with some beautiful images and illustrations, on a subject that often remains hidden. It provides an important record for a part of Scotland’s heritage, and the mercantile and BAME communities in the UK.
This publication recognises the centuries-old contributions of Southeast Asian Mariners and particularly the Bengali-speaking wider community settled in Scotland, and certainly will help in the decolonisation process that Glasgow Life Museums and BAG are jointly working on.
